If then, ladies, the big-wigs begin to sneer at the course of our studies, calling our darling romances foolish, trivial, noxious to the mind, enervators of intellect, fathers of idleness, and what not, let us at once take a high ground, and say,—Go you to your own employments, and to such dull studies as you fancy; go and bob for triangles, from the Pons Asinorum; go enjoy your dull black draughts of metaphysics; go fumble over history books, and dissert upon Herodotus and Livy; OUR histories are, perhaps, as true as yours; our drink is the brisk sparkling champagne drink, from the presses of Colburn, Bentley and Co.; our walks are over such sunshiny pleasure-grounds as Scott and Shakspeare have laid out for us; and if our dwellings are castles in the air, we find them excessively splendid and commodious;—be not you envious because you have no wings to fly thither. Let the big-wigs despise us; such contempt of their neighbors is the custom of all barbarous tribes;—witness, the learned Chinese: Tippoo Sultaun declared that there were not in all Europe ten thousand men: the Sklavonic hordes, it is said, so entitled themselves from a word in their jargon, which signifies “to speak;” the ruffians imagining that they had a monopoly of this agreeable faculty, and that all other nations were dumb.
Not so: others may be DEAF; but the novelist has a loud, eloquent, instructive language, though his enemies may despise or deny it ever so much. What is more, one could, perhaps, meet the stoutest historian on his own ground, and argue with him; showing that sham histories were much truer than real histories; which are, in fact, mere contemptible catalogues of names and places, that can have no moral effect upon the reader.
As thus:—
Julius Cæsar beat Pompey, at Pharsalia.
The Duke of Marlborough beat Marshal Tallard at Blenheim.
The Constable of Bourbon beat Francis the First, at Pavia.
And what have we here?—so many names, simply. Suppose Pharsalia had been, at that mysterious period when names were given, called Pavia; and that Julius Cæsar’s family name had been John Churchill;—the fact would have stood in history, thus:—
“Pompey ran away from the Duke of Marlborough at Pavia.”
And why not?—we should have been just as wise. Or it might be stated that—
“The tenth legion charged the French infantry at Blenheim; and Cæsar, writing home to his mamma, said, ‘Madame, tout est perdu fors l’honneur.’”
What a contemptible science this is, then, about which quartos are written, and sixty-volumed Biographies Universelles, and Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedias, and the like! the facts are nothing in it, the names everything and a gentleman might as well improve his mind by learning Walker’s “Gazetteer,” or getting by heart a fifty-years-old edition of the “Court Guide.”
Having thus disposed of the historians, let us come to the point in question—the novelists.